It got wild -- that fin de siecle party back in 00 19. History was being re-written by the likes of Jacob Burkhardt, Germany was losing its Seele to the newly fulminant Reichsturm, and Nietzsche's aphoristic philology was a glowing stick of "dynamite" ready to explode and bring in die Götterdämmerung. Twilight of the Idols. The Death of Gods and Great Men. Warum? Das Volk. Wagen. The little people clamoring for power-sharing, and reanimation of Christian values. Nietzsche, the son of a preacher man (yes, he was), was having none of that. As far as he was concerned, Christianity had caused perhaps irreparable harm to the human spirit.
Nietzsche had a point. Christianity has softened the spirit, tenderized the meat of Man's resolve, tossed more than one soul on the barbie of the devil. Perhaps most importantly, Nietzsche saw that church structures (its rites and rituals) and the interpretive, privileged haranguing of preachers (no matter how gently) made folks lazy in their thinking, developing his famous parsing of the sermon and its mount as "herd mentality." He had absolutely loved Richard Wagner and the greatness of his new chromatic music, but when he heard the conversion sounds, from Nordic mythology to Christianity, culminating in the genuflection and mythopoesis of Parsifal, a breakup was inevitable. But maybe Nietzsche went too far in his truly legendary diatribes aimed at what he called strutting, proselytizing "turkey cocks of God." Oy!
The first task is to try to understand from whence his venom welled. It is, of course, complicated. Nietzsche grew up amidst devout Christian women (mother, sister, aunts), who reinforced the taming of his shrewish nature; it made him shy and aloof and testy, which was great for philosophy but played havoc with his potential love life. Lou Andreas-Salome' loved Nietzsche's mind, but laughed at his romantic clumsiness, on her way to Freud and Rilke. What could Fritz do? He was not in their league sexually. Hell, he wasn't even in pal Paul Rees's league.
In "The Problem of Socrates," which is part of a loose collection of essays that make up Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wakes up cranky to the whole wisdom industry that has informed his education thus far. Socrates was "decadent." He seems to have Aristophanes' attitude toward the early deconstructor of democracy as portrayed in The Clouds: S was no Übermensch. Nietzsche tells us,
These wisest men of all ages -- they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? late? tottery? decadents? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, inspired by a little whiff of carrion?
Nothing but the dead and dying back in Socrates's little town, it seems. "Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there" (473)? asks Nietzsche, dismissing the dialectics of Socrates as "bad manners." One of Nietzsche's self-designated tasks was to clear the air of historical stench.
Socrates, avers Nietzsche, introduces, with his jibes, a concept that Nietzsche despised more than any other -- ressentiment. He writes,
Is the irony of Socrates an expression of revolt? Of plebeian ressentiment? " The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time"Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates.
For Nietzsche, ressentiment is directly tied to revenge. Revenge of the pleb over the noble.
This ressentiment is a key to understanding Nietzsche's take on Christian negativity. In Nietzsche Now! Glenn Wallis explains the terminology:
It names an affect, an emotional charge, that arises when we believe we have been slighted or harmed yet find ourselves incapable of redressing the offense. Ressentiment is an affect of the powerless. It differs from resentment precisely in this regard. A person with the means for redress or revenge can feel resentment and respond accordingly. The attitude of ressentiment, by contrast, is: "I suffer: someone must be to blame for it."
Christianity is about blaming and resigning at the same time, as Nietzsche sees it. It's a loser's religion.
This mission he was on seems to have continued with the fresh air of new aesthetics (Wagner, and the Apollonian/Dionysian tao) and the desire to rid the world's thinking (in the West, at least) of the defilement of Slave Morality, as he saw encompassed in the decadence of the Christian ethos. Nietzsche contrasts Master and Slave Morality. This may be his most controversial area of thought, as it can be and has been read as acceptance of such a division as necessary. Indeed, in Genealogy of Morals, he further differentiates and clarifies:
Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of oneself, slave morality immediately says No to what comes from outside, to what is different, to what is not oneself: and this No is its creative deed. This reversal of the value positing glance--this necessary direction outward instead of back to oneself-is of the nature of ressentiment: to come into being, slave morality requires an outside world, a counterworld; physiologically speaking, it requires external stimuli in order to react at all: its action is at bottom always a reaction.
To sublimate and compensate for the inability to respond with authenticity the slave becomes a reactionary. For Nietzsche, nobody represents slave morality better than Christians. He often sees life as changing, unbridled, requiring individual courage to endure and all topped with amor fati. Christians subjugate themselves to the will of an implausible god whose works, including humans, are to be interpreted for them by priests and liars. Nietzsche blurts in Ecce Homo, --" Have I made myself understood? -- Dionysus versus the Crucified..."
Nietzsche castigates Christ in a manner similar to how he abused Socrates. He was especially caustic of Christ's "politics," seeing the age he lived in as generally apolitical In a sense, Christ, like Socrates, was "guilty of bad manners," as far as Nietzsche was concerned.
It can be difficult for modern minds to understand, but we see such reactionary morality, perhaps, in the US, in far right, among Christian conservatives, who, some believe want to tamper with democracy and the Bill of Rights by imposing bans on history-learning and books that might promote a critical race theory response to classic American literature. Not that would be much solace to an astute modern Christian, but Nietzsche was not fond of democracy either. He was unimpressed by what he saw as "herd mentality" thinking.
But did Nietzsche go too far? For sure, Christianity is ostensibly set up to secure a relationship with God that leads to the shedding of sin through acts of contrition, and reiterated lessons in the continuous connectivity of humankind through history, from Eden on -- lessons delivered by educated, well-read ministers. They provide solace for otherwise inexplicable suffering and injustice and political imbalance that may never see a shift toward equality. Marx said religion is the opium of the masses; and even many priests would agree on the positive value of a tasty alcoholic beverage -- once in a while. Freud wrote about the future of this illusion. We could not cope without sublimation of our existential anxieties and stressors. Not everyone can be a superman.
I have personally seen the good work of Christians in the fray. As a child of the 60s and 70s I came to read about superhero Catholic leaders who broke the mold and refused to be merely shepherds of lost souls. Most of these leaders were Jesuits. The Berrigan Brothers rejected the slaughter of the war machine in Vietnam. And nuns who protested nukes. The brothers of LaSalette in Ipswich who personally saved me from premature suffering; who opened and manned drop-in centers for drug addicts, and wept as they fell, one by one. These folks made the practical Christian ethos come alive -- often at great personal cost, such as excommunication.
Reading Nietzsche through a Christian lens can be challenging. There is some ambivalence involved. There are ways in which the religions of Abraham seem anachronistic, even pointless, if their actions in the world are as incomprehensible as the absence of answer to our pleas for mercy to God. Take climate change: Imagine, I say to myself, if the Abrahamics got together as a bloc party and voted to end Climate Change, and made it known that they would not tolerate another moment of the wholesale destruction of God's Earth and went on a general strike globally until nukes and war and climate catastrophe were eliminated. Nuns could set up stands for lemonate.
On the other hand, I am sufficiently Nietzschean to accept that we will have to enter the abyss before we can play under the rainbow together. I don't see Christianity as being as valuable spiritually as it once might have been. It is still ruled by forces of ressentiment. It has not changed enough to answer the challenges of our times and may, in some small way, enjoy the evidence of the decline of humanity as some kind of revenge for its historical impotence over things that matter most to the species.
An important new book on the philosopher and his life is out: Nietzsche Now! by Glenn Wallis, an independent scholar who kives in Philly. He runs an online education site called Incite that features progrms in Buddhism, Anarchy, and Nietzsche. The Wallis account has a fresh translation and a new approach for reading Nietzsche for contemporary values.
See my interview with Glenn Wallis, re; Nietzsche Now! here.
WORKS CITED Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Trans. Thomas Wayne. NY: Algora Publishing (2004).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, Trans. Walter Kaufmann. NY: Penguin Books (1954/1982).
Glenn Wallis, Nietzsche Now! NY: Warbler Books (2024).
